


up on the marble arch

by asymmetric



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: (ironically said by a woman), Abusive Relationships, Character Study, F/M, Misogynistic Langauge, Other, Verbal Abuse, probably stemming from homophobia, this is not a nice story it's just Luke being shamed for expressing feminine aspects essentially
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 06:58:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17503817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asymmetric/pseuds/asymmetric
Summary: “you know you look like a pussy with those red nails, right.”





	up on the marble arch

**Author's Note:**

> hi I wrote something 5sos for the first time in three years and it's something absolutely no one but me wanted
> 
> I saw the lie to me video and this happened. this is the weird shit I write these days, sorry
> 
> (I don't presume to know anything about luke's relationships or frictions in them, or causes of difficulties. the woman in this is an unnamed creation because I don't know shit about his exes or which one lie to me was about, even if we have guesses)

“you know you look like a pussy with those red nails, right.”

her lips meet around her cigarette on the “p”; she brings the v of her fingers up to move it so she can clip the “t” of “right”. She has always liked to end thoughts with crisp sounds. Smoke curls around the sentence between her teeth.

another drag in, her gold-lidded eyes sliding shut.

“I’m not saying you can’t do shit like that for fun sometimes, it just makes me feel weird thinking of being seen with you looking like that.”

she exhales a thin thundercloud. The air in the room becomes a step more opaque, more hers.

“I mean, I want to be dating a man. I want to be able to go out and have people look at us and see a man and a woman. you know which one you are, right?”

her own nails are purple today, pinching delicately at his chest, finding the softer parts where muscle melted into pudge after he stopped working with the physical trainer so often on tour. The words, like the nails, are so carefully sharp he finds himself admiring them.

he tells her he knows, but he’s allowed too much petulance to leak into his voice. The nails dig in suddenly. A flash of red at her bare waist as his hand grabs at her in reflex—but then he’s frozen. He’s failed to choose an action after instinct, a push or a pull, a yes or a no.

“hands to yourself,” she bites, and rears back off of him, into the storm cloud orbiting above their heads. The distant ceiling light has gone hazy. “I said you weren’t getting any more of that tonight, not until you can learn not to shoot so fucking quick.”

she laughs, sweet and bitter as one of those candies he can never remember the name of, the kind that practically crack your jaw, the kind that had once scraped ashton’s tongue raw until he bled when they were kids and he was so nervous about a gig that he couldn’t stop rolling one around in his mouth, compulsive. He kept his mouth shut the whole set, and then backstage he’d shown luke the ragged red line in the centre of his tongue and luke had to clench his fists against the urge to touch it.

“how embarrassing is that? Like, I’m dating a rock star, I should be able to tell my friends I’m having wild fucking sex, but you’re like a five minute ride.”

she’s not being careful with the burnt out end of the cig. Black flecks drift down to freckle the top of her tits. Her blue halter top is still hanging down from her waist over her lap—he’d just untied the neck earlier instead of taking the whole thing off when they got back to the hotel from the club. That must have been when she first saw his nails. The club had been dark, but he’d turned the lights on in the room so he could watch himself palm the skin over her heart.

ashton had gotten his nails done at the same time as luke last week, in the same shade of red. But ashton was stinging from fresh tattoos then, whereas luke can’t handle that kind of stuff. The inches luke has on the other man have never meant anything—ashton has a kind of metal in him that luke can’t replicate in himself for her.

she once said, early on with them, that she liked how “different” he was from other men. “You’re so much freer,” she said. “You let me do the weirdest shit to you. It’s so brave.”

he asks her if she’s mad at him. His voice is as insubstantial as the smoke in the room. He wants to ask her to open a window. He wants to have a moment alone to go over the moments that lead here and find out where he’d gone wrong—he’d switched his flight to arrive closer to when she would be in L.A. and he’d dragged ashton to a club that she’d recommended and he’d brought her flowers and he’d thought. He’d kind of thought she’d like the nails.

but maybe she can sense that when he got them, it had been more for him than her. He knows he’s selfish. 

four months ago, when his knees were branded with red-bruised carpet swirls and his chin was sticky wet and sore from when she’d stepped over him with a fist snarled in his hair and directed his mouth up under her skirt and gotten him lost and aching and drunk on it, she’d rubbed a thumb over her own lips—gold again, because it was her colour, the colour of opulence, she’d told him once—and had brought her hand down to where he still waited, and smeared the shine of it high on his cheekbone like an artist's signature.

when he'd found his reflection later that night, the streak of gold looked so wild and beautiful he stared at himself for a long moment, electrified.

“look, you know I get shitty when I see people saying dumb stuff about us,” she says. “There were just some bitches on Twitter today getting to me.”

she flicks the dead cigarette butt off somewhere into the ocean of space around their bed, and moves down his body, her mouth tagging soft, careful kisses where she’d pinched before. Tiny, tender apologies—she doesn’t say things like that out loud. That’s alright, ‘cause he gets her. He knows what she means.

but his body isn’t cooperating—isn’t responding to her touch the way it should. She will notice in a moment. He fights his way on top of a ground swell of panic that he knows from experience will only make things worse, and closes his eyes to try and relax.

for some reason, he sees the club from earlier that night.

not the moment he spotted her across the crowded room and rushed to her side in a fluorescent burst of relief that he could never fully articulate to his friends. instead, he sees ashton’s hand on the table next to his, blue-skinned under the lights.

“come to mine,” one of them says.

“I can’t.”

“we can leave before she gets here.”

“why do you talk about her like that?”

“luke,” ashton says. He says his name the same way she did the night she told him she’d had no idea what to do with her life until she met him, that he gives her structure, direction, purpose. He says it like luke is something precious and a little baffling, something he desperately needs.

“i just want you to look your best, baby. For us to be the best,” she says, mouth at his hipbone. From this angle, her eyes are all gold. “you know I love you.”

luke loves her too. He bends his knees up at her urging and his body surges to meet her lips, well-trained. The panic and the club and ashton’s face fade.

the image of those bright red nails stays, tap-tapping on the table like a line of waving flags.

**Author's Note:**

> (if this was familiar, leave ur shitty partner btw)


End file.
